DESIGNING THE LEARNSCAPE IN SCHOOLS AND ELSEWHERE
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend in India who lives with his family in a remote village, and refuses to send his two children to school. The conversation turned, as it has often done in the past, to the benefits of schooling (as in sending children to school) versus schooling them at home. This conversation came right in the middle of a few other things that are engaging me at the moment. At school, I am involved in an attempt at improving the national high school program for the type of schools that I work for in Turkey (private schools for mostly wealthy kids many of whom aspire to study abroad, with the choice of the IB diploma to help prepare them for university) by building in more flexibility, student choice and school autonomy. I am also trying to design a new kind of IB school that I hope to start in India or elsewhere if I can convince enough people about the need for such a school. And again, despite my sympathy with my friend's refusal to send his children to school, I caught myself falling into the compulsive error of conceiving of education as synonymous with schooling.
If innovation in education is to occur at all, I believe it's necessary to detach the concept of education permanently from schooling. Or rather, reconceptualize schools as an important vehicle for education, but not the only one. This assumes that children will not be obliged to go to school at all, but only if they wish to for specific purposes. Forcing children to go to school is like forcing people to eat at a restaurant: why can't they just go there to eat with friends when they want to, or to learn a new recipe? Why not cook a good meal at home, or at a friend's?
Once one can conceive of schools as only one of many vehicles for education, one can then go on to conceive of various designs for schools that can support educational objectives. One can also imagine other ways of designing the learning process independently of schools, e.g., through informal or formal learning networks.
In thinking of alternatives to schools, traditional or unconventional, I was searching for a word to express a space for structured learning. I hit first upon learnspace, and then learnscape, only to find in Google that it had already begun to be used by various people. One of them was Jay Cross, whose use of the word came closest to what I had in mind - an "ecological" process (involving collaboration with others and with interaction with the learner's environment) of acquiring the abilities to do things in the real world. This applies not only to little kids learning how to speak, or teaching each other a game, or how to play the guitar or hang out on Facebook. It also applies to more formal educational situations. According to Howard Gardner, it is the "disciplinary expert" whose abilities enable him/her to understand the world, and to apply that understanding flexibly and in an unscripted manner to new and unfamiliar situations and problems. Presumably, the perfection of understanding is an "asymptotic" process of developing successive versions that are more and more accurate versions of reality, or versions that "get it less wrong". But however the process of developing understanding proceeds, it is most accurately conceived as an ecological process.
The big question for me is: how do I apply this conceptualization to my idea of a new school? Perhaps I should write a bit more about my school in my next posting.
If innovation in education is to occur at all, I believe it's necessary to detach the concept of education permanently from schooling. Or rather, reconceptualize schools as an important vehicle for education, but not the only one. This assumes that children will not be obliged to go to school at all, but only if they wish to for specific purposes. Forcing children to go to school is like forcing people to eat at a restaurant: why can't they just go there to eat with friends when they want to, or to learn a new recipe? Why not cook a good meal at home, or at a friend's?
Once one can conceive of schools as only one of many vehicles for education, one can then go on to conceive of various designs for schools that can support educational objectives. One can also imagine other ways of designing the learning process independently of schools, e.g., through informal or formal learning networks.
In thinking of alternatives to schools, traditional or unconventional, I was searching for a word to express a space for structured learning. I hit first upon learnspace, and then learnscape, only to find in Google that it had already begun to be used by various people. One of them was Jay Cross, whose use of the word came closest to what I had in mind - an "ecological" process (involving collaboration with others and with interaction with the learner's environment) of acquiring the abilities to do things in the real world. This applies not only to little kids learning how to speak, or teaching each other a game, or how to play the guitar or hang out on Facebook. It also applies to more formal educational situations. According to Howard Gardner, it is the "disciplinary expert" whose abilities enable him/her to understand the world, and to apply that understanding flexibly and in an unscripted manner to new and unfamiliar situations and problems. Presumably, the perfection of understanding is an "asymptotic" process of developing successive versions that are more and more accurate versions of reality, or versions that "get it less wrong". But however the process of developing understanding proceeds, it is most accurately conceived as an ecological process.
The big question for me is: how do I apply this conceptualization to my idea of a new school? Perhaps I should write a bit more about my school in my next posting.
posted by EDUVISIONARY at
10:17 PM
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